


disengaged

by astraea_7



Category: Lost
Genre: claire is left behind, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 02:28:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29801559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astraea_7/pseuds/astraea_7
Summary: you’re crazy, sweetheart, don’t you know?
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7





	disengaged

**Author's Note:**

> my very first fic. set in the three years claire was left on the island.

it’s all a bit of a blur now, days and weeks and months and years all snowballing into each other. a never-ending stretch of floating away, because the day they left, a piece of her left with them. some days she is sure they took her heart, wrapped up in a blanket and beating right next to her baby’s. other times she thinks it’s her brain- why else would she be this way, so distant from herself that she does not know how to get back? or maybe it was only her sanity, she thinks with a sardonic smile. she knows that’s been gone for quite awhile.

_because you’re crazy, you’re not yourself anymore._

there are some days when she thinks that it’s the opposite, and that she is with them. out there, somewhere, anywhere but here. for it is here where a bit of herself was left behind, half conscious and wandering, searching for something she’ll never find because it’s hers in another life, but never this one. she should remember what happened to her if she was really all there, and that is how she deduces that she must be fractured. shards of a girl scattered all over the world, and as soon as she picks up one she drops another to take its place. she’ll never be whole because she can’t hold herself together. she’ll never find herself because she was doomed from the start to be lost.

some days she sees memories before her eyes encased in glass balls, and if she holds one in her hands it will play for her. crystal clear pictures of a girl and her mother, a girl and her boyfriend, a girl and her baby. she thinks the girl is her, but she cannot be sure because her mind is an unreliable thing, and the island likes to trick her. and she feels so detached from the girl in the glass balls, like she’s spying on moments from a stranger’s life.

she wishes she could know what she looks like.

_you’re crazy, sweetheart, don’t you know?_

sometimes she does- it leaps out at her like a monster in the night and scares her into submission. other times she knows it with clarity, like a fact she’s been spoon-fed since childhood. the sky is blue. the earth is round. _you’re crazy, you can’t trust yourself. who says that any of this is real?_

the world blurs around her from day to night and back again. images and sensations encase her in a tornado and she lets it sweep her away, for it is easier than fighting back.

her face is pressed onto the forest floor with the sharp tang of earth in her nostrils, gasping for air that she isn’t sure will come. every time she inhales she breathes a bit of the island into her, and she feels it within, crawling and contaminating and turning her body to poison.

then it’s all gone and she stands with a gun in her hand. although she can’t remember using one before, she goes through the motions on autopilot. sometimes she sees the spray of red on another’s chest as they fall with a thud to the ground. other times it is her who is bleeding out.

_i did this. to them. to myself._

the one memory she feels certain is hers is the baby, her baby. his face comes to her in soft breaths and sweet lullabies, but when she tries to pluck his image from the air it all dissolves. there are times when she feels him cradled in her hands, but in the empty cavity where her heart should be throbs a hollow ache of loneliness. he isn’t there because here, in this strange counterfeit life, she has nothing for herself.

she is a shell washed up on the shores of the island, her insides hollowed out by the waves and reshaped into something new. she supposes that she must have had a name and a self and a soul at one point, but she’s been scraped clean of everything she could’ve been to be this.

a puppet for the island. an indent in the earth. a frame with no picture inside.

wayward.

forgotten.

there must be other beings here, she must have encountered them a hundred times in this off-balance infinity, but it’s all a fog in the back of her mind. it’s just her now, her mess of shattered pieces and fleeting hints of memories, but even those might not be real. she can’t trust her eyes or her mind or her heart. she may not even have those things, anymore, after all that she has lost.

_you’re crazy, sweetheart. so, so crazy._

it’s the only thing she knows for sure.


End file.
